Symbol Frustration

Intimacy is knowledge of a person, their interior, their love, their passion and desire. Intimacy is the sharing of our hopes, fears and dreams – all these things and thereby [intimacy] is sharing of our selves.
~ OH, The Intimacy of Symbols

There is a thread on SMTR, “how do you accept your partner’s decisions even when you don’t like them“, that continually catches my eye because I keep thinking it’s about love symbol negotiation. Yet ‘accepting decisions you don’t like’ is different than ‘accepting your partner’s love symbols when you don’t like how they work for you‘. I don’t have much of a problem with accepting my wife’s decisions, but on the occasions when we have differing symbols, I often have trouble accepting symbols I don’t understand very well.

On one hand it seems obvious to say you’re going to have difficulty meaningfully using symbols you don’t understand very well when those symbols are word combinations in a conversation. Yet on the other hand when those symbols are deeds done, anyone can do something for another person without that deed meaning the same thing to both people. And while I always want all our symbols to be effective communication for both of us, I often accept and use her deed-symbols (i.e. just simply doing what she tells me to do) – even though I may not understand what her deed-symbols mean and symbolize to her. I just do them simply because I love her and I know they work for her and will make her happy -  and since what I do for her, I do for me, in a way I appropriate her deed-symbol, albeit to mean something different to me.

Yet I continually wish I could just as easily do the same with word-symbols, just use the words that are meaningful to her regardless of whether they are meaningful for me. But I have realized the reason this is far more difficult with word-symbols is because the use of words is predicated on another (the other) person understanding their meaning in (nigh unto) the exact same way. Words are almost always purposed for knowledge in a way that deeds are not always purposed.

Thus if two people don’t find, learn and use symbols that mean the same thing to one another, they aren’t going to have as much knowledge about one another, and they just aren’t going to be as intimate. In fact, the very process of listening to your partner and learning the symbols that are already functional for them is going to be a process of increasing intimacy.

But listening, finding and learning are things that take time (“patience, hard thing!”) and more: for while in the midst of some symbol confusion that only underscores and increases my frustration in being less intimate than I want to be, less on the same page about what which symbols mean what between us than I want to be, how do I wade through that frustration in order to listen, find, learn and use her symbols better – more quickly?